Food Security and ABCG

The Dar Vision for the Future of Biodiversity in Africa seeks to, in part, "Mainstream biodiversity in human well-being and development agendas." Towards this end, the Dar Vision supports work that "Harness[es] biodiversity and ecosystem services for improved agriculture (including increasing productivity and yields and improving food security; and adopting conservation agriculture or 'ecoagriculture' approaches."

ABCG has been working on issues related to food security for some time. ABCG co-hosted a meeting with the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force in 2004 on "Food Security and Conservation in Africa: Addressing Hunger and Farming Issues to Conserve Wildlife". Since that time,we have continued to link to issues and policies affecting food security in a conservation context.

FY2012 Activities & Achievements

The objective of this task is to develop an integrated set of activities that will begin to allow enhanced understanding of the conditions necessary for sustainable agriculture intensification to improve food security, and improved on-farm uptake of biodiversity-sensitive intensification practices. Participating organizations include AWF, CI and WCS.

Through this ABCG collaborative work, we have built knowledge on diversification of food security strategies, the role of agricultural landscapes in climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the linkages to conservation in African landscapes. This work has followed the findings and lessons learned from the experiences in AWF's Zambezi Heartland, WCS's Ituri landscape and CI's spatial analysis work, with a view to scale up the review and analysis in Africa to feed into a formal review of the integrated agricultural landscape initiatives (ecoagriculture) in Africa and a review of the utilization of integrated landscape management to advance climate change adaptation and mitigation.

These reviews are a component of an Initiative led by a group of global partners implementing the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature (LPFN) Initiative . LPFN is a three-year collaborative Initiative to foster cross-sectoral dialogue, learning and action to support the widespread practice of integrated agricultural landscape approaches. In doing so, the Initiative is advancing viable pathways for sustainable development in places where food production, ecosystem health, and human well-being must be achieved simultaneously. One of the Initiative’s major objectives is to define and advocate policy and action agendas that support innovators in all relevant sectors in developing ecoagriculture landscapes on a scale that would make a significant global contribution toward improving food security, reducing rural poverty, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services.

We have built on some of the major findings of the food security work done to date, that will allow us to scale up the use of improved input packages and participatory land use planning that provides for diversification of food security strategies to building improved farming systems as a tool that contributes to achieving conservation objectives. Unfortunately, due to funding restrictions, WCS was unable to carry out its planned activities for FY2012. In FY2013, those funds will be used to augment WCS’s activities in the F.1 Climate Change Adaptation task.

FY2011 Activities & Achievements

Currently, ABCG is working to develop an enhanced understanding of the conditions necessary for sustainable agriculture intensification to improve food security, and improved on-farm uptake of biodiversity-sensitive intensification practices. With the support of USAID's Biodiversity Analysis and Technical Support (BATS) program, ABCG is developing and testing a foodshed baseline assessment methodology as a part of conservation spatial planning-based projects and is also preparing case studies that will begin to allow enhanced understanding of the conditions necessary for sustainable agriculture intensification to improve food security, and improved on-farm uptake of biodiversity-sensitive intensification practices. ABCG members African Wildlife Foundation, Conservation International, and Wildlife Conservation Society are playing critical roles in these efforts at sites in Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo.

29 October 2004: A meeting entitled, "Food Security and Conservation in Africa: Addressing Hunger and Farming Issues to Conserve Wildlife" was organized by the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group and the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force.

The purpose of the meeting was to:

discuss the linkages between food security and biodiversity conservation;

learn about successful efforts to prevent poaching by addressing the hunger situation and farming practices of local communities; and

identify areas for possible field level collaboration between the conservation community, agricultural and food security sectors and other stake holders in Africa.

Current Initiatives to End Hunger and Improve Agricultural Extension in Africa

by Charles Riemenschneider, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

A roundtable discussion was held and next steps were identified on how the conservation and food security sectors can collaborate more at the field level in Africa. Please see the following meeting notes, background materials and presentations.

Food Security and Wildlife Conservation Notes

Photo Credit: USAID

develop and test a foodshed baseline assessment methodology as a part of conservation spatial planning-based projects and also prepare case studies that will begin to allow enhanced understanding of the conditions necessary for sustainable agriculture intensification to improve food security, and improved on-farm uptake of biodiversity-sensitive intensification practices.